GoKawiilRedwood Materials has long dominated EV battery recycling, but what if they could drain every last drop of energy from those batteries before recycling them? I talk with the company’s CTO, Colin Campbell, about Redwood Energy, a new division doing just that by deploying used batteries as grid-scale storage at a massive scale. This isn’t just a side project; it’s a plan to turn a massive wave of incoming used batteries into a key resource for the grid.
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David Roberts
Hi everybody, this is Volts for October 22, 2025, “Can ‘second life’ EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?” I’m your host, David Roberts. Redwood Materials started recycling lithium-ion batteries before it was cool, before it was profitable, and before there were very many lithium-ion batteries to speak of. In the five years since, it has grown and scaled to capture the overwhelming majority of the booming automotive-battery recycling market in North America.
Earlier this year, it spun off a new division called Redwood Energy. The idea is simple: it is going to hook the EV batteries it receives up to large arrays that serve as grid-scale energy storage. That way, it can drain every last bit of useful life out of them before it recycles them.
Colin Campbell
So-called “second life” batteries have been discussed for many, many years, but this is the first time they have been deployed at appreciable scale. Redwood has built an off-grid facility where 20 megawatts of solar panels are powering 63 megawatt-hours of second life batteries that feed into two one-megawatt data centers.
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